Ship Breaking a Health,
Environmental Hazard

A
propos of the sinking of the luxury liner, the Costa Concordia off the
coast of Italy in January, one might wonder what will happen to that
ship once the immediate issues of collecting the victims and siphoning
off the fuel are accomplished.

After the media coverage
has come to a halt, what is the process of dealing with the wreck – as
wrecks are dealt with continuously around the world? And what
effect do these “mishaps” and the resultant clean-up operations have on
the health of people involved and the environment around them?

It’s called ship breaking. It’s big and deadly business.

Ultimately,
the salvage operation involves the dismantling of ships for further use
of their parts and components, some at end-of-life, and some after
breaking-news disasters.

The global shipping trade is
growing exponentially with an estimated 90,000 ships now active on the
world’s oceans. The life cycle of a commercial ship is 25 to 30
years.

Estimates are that 1000 large ships per year are
broken down, and that this figure will grow quickly. At least
three-quarters of ship breaking takes place in other-worldly massive
“yards” in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and China. These
developing country locations are used because safety, health and
environmental regulations are more lax.

Using beaches
with just the right slope and tidal and geological make-up, and with
the availability of cheap labour, Asia hosts this dirty, under-reported
industry. (Satellite photo.)

Ship breakers in Third World countries do this work
because it is a way out of poverty and starvation, although still
dangerous and underpaid. They often work literally with their
bare hands.

With blow torches, sledgehammers, chisels
and wedges they carve up ships that rich nations have discarded.
Massive hulls are cut down into hundred kilogram pieces and loaded onto
trucks to be sold as scrap, a profitable business for their bosses.

Ship
breaking labourers actually live on site, in hovels with little
furniture, with no facilities such as showers or latrines, spending
long days taking ships apart for recycling and re-use. Toxic
substances they handle or are exposed to include asbestos, lead,
mercury and low levels of radiation.

Workers are also at
risk from fires, electric shock, fumes, defective equipment and
themselves falling from scaffolding. They also work in locations where
the temperature reaches 40 degrees Celsius, thus being susceptible to
heat stroke. They also choose not to wear hot, heavy protective
gear.

Workers suffer broken ankles, severed fingers,
smashed skulls and many diseases, from dysentery to tuberculosis.
They may die coughing from the dust and chemicals they’ve been exposed
to or in a sudden fall or from falling debris. Instead of
steel-toed boots, they wear the sandals they brought from their poor
village.

As the ship breaking business is economically important
to the developed world, employing thousands of people and yielding
millions of tons of material, things are not about to change in
bettering the lives of these workers. In fact, efforts to bring
in regulations have created controversy in the countries
affected.

The companies, for instance, wanted the right
to bring in ships to Bangladesh, the hub of this industry, by just
declaring the ships to be free of toxins but without resorting to
third-party inspection and certification.

Government,
supported or urged by labour, brought in regulations, then rescinded
them, and then brought them in again after massive protests.

Now
the industry is appealing the regulations in court. In India,
companies affected by new health and environmental regulations are
complaining that they are losing business, thus affecting the economic
welfare of Indian citizens, while the industry moves to other countries
with lower standards.

New technologies are being
developed to mitigate the risk to ship breaking workers, such as the
use of lasers, wire saws and mobile shears, and biodegradable chemical
washes.

However, these are only available to rich world
operations such as in the U.S., where the Americans use them to break
down their own military vessels.

Ship breaking and the labour, health and environmental issues surrounding it, are hidden to most of us.

With
international organizations and the media tackling more of these
injustices – child labour, human trafficking, child soldiers – it is
hoped that progress can be made to make the lives of the working poor
safer and more dignified.

It would be interesting to
trace the path that the Costa Concordia will now take from a wreck on a
beach to the cut-down beaches in some remote Third World location, and
on to be a part of other ships or buildings sometime in the future.Zack Gross works
for the Manitoba Council for International
Co-operation (MCIC), a
coalition of more than 40 international development organizations.